Changes to Keywords in Google Analytics

Do you make use of the keyword report in Google Analytics to look at keywords that reach your website? If so you may be seeing a number of changes to the data.

You’ll start to see times when the keyword is represented as ‘not provided’. In reality it’s all down to how google passes referrer data from a Google search result provided to a signed in user. Its all done to privacy and hiding the actual keyword string searched and passing it across as a secure connection to your website.

Will this really cause an issue to the operation of the site. It’s been reported that it will effect around 10% of the organic traffic to a website and a number of people have tested this and agree through looking at the traffic to the site.

If your running PPC ads then the data is still passed across. Some will argue that this is Google providing a better service to its paying customers and the easy answer is, Yes they are.

This will change the way we collect data, but from what Ive read you’ll still get an idea of the search phrases where your site appears through the Webmasters interface and Adwords reports.

If you want to read a more in depth article on this topic, take a look at the following site